Information dissemination has proved of great utility in both commercial and military situations. Such dissemination has typically been arranged so that content sent from one central point can be received at a number of recipient points. For example, television and radio stations have generally used radio towers as their central points, whereas cable systems have used cable head-ends. Satellite television and radio systems have used satellites. In military situations, satellites and other “elevated platforms” (such as aircraft or lighter than air vehicles) have been used as the central point from which information is disseminated to the intended recipients, e.g., ships, field camps, or vehicles.
The above systems have generally been quite simple in their operation. For example, well-known data dissemination systems such as a Global Broadcast System have repeated transmission of a particular piece of information N times in order to boost the probability that it is correctly received by each intended recipient. Although such strategies have the virtue of simplicity, they are not robust in that they do not provide adequately for recovering content if some, possibly even a large fraction, of the data cannot be correctly received by a recipient.
Methods of robustly transmitting packetized data were developed such that for each piece of content, a potentially limitless stream of meta-content is generated, which includes mathematical metaphors that describe the original content. A bit-by-bit copy of the original content may be quickly recovered from any portion of the meta-content that, in aggregate, is equal to the length of the original content, regardless of the order in which the meta-content was received. These methods, however, do not provide for packets being transmitted according to a schedule that defines the number of times each block of information may be transmitted, a particular order for transmitting blocks, or a maximum amount of bandwidth to be used to transmit the block. The use of such a schedule would make it possible to adjust broadcast transmission characteristics by simply changing the schedule. In addition, the use of a schedule would make it possible for recipient devices to operate in a reduced power mode until, according to the schedule, useful information is to be broadcast. Further, the existing methods do not describe a way for recipients to determine when information in the process of being received is outdated and should be discarded.